Loving our neighbors as ourselves is one of the overarching spiritual laws of our time. It is an irreducible commandment, intended to remind us that we are bound to each other by compassion. It seems obvious that such a way of life would be the panacea for all social maladies, including perhaps the deterioration of civilization itself. If we are keeping our neighbors on equal par with ourselves and our families, then we are bound to build utopian communities, right?

We would like to learn from you what attracts you to the Charter for Compassion, how you use the Charter, how you participate in the compassion movement, what we do or provide that you appreciate, and how we can do a more effective job of enabling and supporting the movement.

I ask people in Davis, California to share their written concept of compassion in a notebook. The responses span different ideas based mostly on people's spiritual/religious beliefs or personal experience. Also being a college town, often people share from an academic perspective. I began asking June 3rd, 2009 and thus far have received over ten thousand responses. Here are a few examples of what people think compassion is from anonymous entries shared in the notebooks:

This week, I finished a book on the Columbine shootings. The piece was written by Dave Cullen, a New York Times journalist, who lived through the media circus that was the coverage of the massacre. The story uses hindsight to delve into many of the myths surrounding the shootings, the perpetrators, the victims, and the culture that permeated Columbine High School. The story is expertly told.

This was received by Charter supporter, Diana Peters. Diana wrote this piece after see saw Gayle King being interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show. Since the conversation between King and Rose was on Maya Angelou, Diana decided to address this writing to Gayle King. The picture of Maya Angelou is not by Diana.

On June 3rd, 2009, I entered into a lifelong endeavor, asking a simple question to the world, "What is compassion?" Last Tuesday marked the five year anniversary. Since that initial day, after asking over twenty thousand people and receiving approximately ten thousand entries, I feel as though these first five years are just the beginning of an incredible lifelong journey of bringing awareness to compassion.